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World War II may have ended 80 years ago, but it’s still happening for Jenny Chan, a 2012 University of Illinois graduate.

Chan is president and founder of Pacific Atrocities Education, a non-profit based in San Francisco that churns out history regarding World War II’s Pacific front.

In addition to publishing 29 books by a wide variety of authors that document human rights abuses, military battles, resistance efforts, and relate other untold efforts from the war, Chan’s group has produced over 500 short historical videos for Pacific Front Untold on YouTube. The group’s website, pacificatrocities.org, has been visited by over half a million visitors in the past 12 months, said Chan, a Chinese-American who first heard horror stories about the war in Asia from her grandmother, who was living in Hong Kong at the time.

The stated mission of Pacific Atrocities Education is to increase awareness about atrocities committed in the Asia-Pacific Theater of World War II through public history projects, said Chan who believes that future generations need to understand, and share this history, she said. Chan said that an estimated 25 million to 35 million people died in Asia during WWII.

Through publishing books, creating educational resources, and heading archival projects on topics such as Korean comfort women, the Bataan Death March, Unit 731 (a biochemical weapons program), and the Nanjing Massacre, the group seeks to help survivors find closure while increasing the dialogue about complex contemporary issues that surround human rights worldwide, said Chan.

While WWII ended in 1945, information related to what happened during the conflict continues to come to light as files are declassified, said Chan, who soon plans another visit to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. to do further research. 

Chan isn’t the first U of I grad to get involved in the war in Asia. “After graduating 100 years before me, in 1912, Minnie Vautrin became a missionary in China and famously saved the lives of at least 10,000 Chinese refugees during the Japanese army’s 1937 invasion of Nanjing. Sixty years later, University of Illinois Iris Chang (class of 1989) unearthed Vautrin’s diary for her award-winning book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” she said.

Pacific Atrocities Education plans a Sept. 18 conference in San Francisco, said Chan “to build bridges and advocate for a more peaceful future.”

Craig Pittman is one writer who doesn’t have to spend a lot of time digging up story ideas. As a 30-year veteran of the Tampa Bay Times and now a reporter for the Florida Phoenix, Pittman gets tips online or by phone as well as having dozens of reliable sources who will alert him to the latest goings-on in his home state of Florida.

Florida has been Pittman’s beat for decades. “Nine hundred people move to this state every day. I look at it as my job to tell them what they’re in for. A lot of people think Florida’s history started with Disney World, but there’s a lot more going on,” said Pittman, named a Florida Literary Legend by the Florida Heritage Book Festival in 2020. “That’s a living legend,” said Pittman. “That’s the important part.”

Florida has gone through plenty of changes over the years, he said. “In the 1940s, we were the getaway state. In the 1950s, we found that cities like Tampa and others were Mafia-dominated. In the 1960s, you had the Kennedy Space Center. In the 1970s, of course, you had Disney World. By 2000, we became known for the (presidential) election we botched,” said Pittman.

His newest book, Welcome to Florida—True Tales from America’s Most Interesting State (University Press of Florida), is a collection of Pittman's recent columns and articles, all about Florida, that most interesting of states. 

Whether writing about developers and a place once known as Jackass Junction or Jimmy Buffett who founded the Save the Manatee Club in 1981 and supported the effort right up until he died in 2023, Pittman captures your interest with his stories. 

“To me, the manatee represents what we all like about Florida—kind of cruising in warm, clear water and not bothering anybody,” said Buffett in Pittman’s book.

Pittman wrote about manatees just last week in the Florida Phoenix in a story  citing the 2,000 manatees that starved to death because the seagrass they depend on for food was wiped out by the consequences of human pollution.

“When you only have about 6,000 manatees to start with, that’s a problem,” said Pittman, who acknowledges that Florida faces severe environmental challenges in the era of climate change.

“Florida is the flattest state in the union, and we’re surrounded on three sides by water. So that water comes surging in. We’re also the hottest state, with temperatures even rising at night. They call it the Sunshine State but most of Florida’s cities get more rain than Seattle. That leads to more mosquitoes and mosquito-related disease,” he said.

More intense hurricanes are doing more damage than ever, but the mantra remains “we will rebuild” instead of “retreat from the beach,” said Pittman. While the governor and a developer-friendly legislature don’t offer much in the way of leadership on climate-change issues, Pittman sees another group weighing in. “The property insurance companies see the pace of disaster,” he said, noting that higher rates or an exodus of insurance firms from the state will likely set the agenda for action.

While he never tires of writing about his home state (Welcome to Florida is his seventh book), Pittman said he may try his hand at fiction next. “I wrote about Tim Dorsey (the Florida novelist who died in 2023) in the book. Usually, Tim would slip in some scenes that directly reference real ‘Florida Man’ headlines. There was the one about the guy who tossed an alligator through a Wendy’s drive-through window. Maybe there’s room for another wacky Florida crime novel. We’ll see,”  he said.

Rob Christensen’s new book, Southern News, Southern Politics (University of North Carolina Press), is more than the history of the newspaper, the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., described at one point by a politician as “pretty damn fearless.” It’s a profile of the Daniels family, starting with Josephus Daniels in 1895, whose family’s ownership of the paper spanned most of the 20th century.

The book chronicles the involvement of members of the Daniels family with U.S. presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, all of whom found support from the paper and its owners.

Josephus Daniels was a white supremacist who used the paper in its early days to spread hate. “Blacks were routinely portrayed as sexual predators, feeding white paranoia,” noted Christensen. 

“Even in situations where a white woman was merely in the presence of a black man, the News & Observer found cause for alarm,” wrote journalist David Zucchino. But Daniels found other subjects to write about. He also went after the almighty railroads and opposed the American Tobacco Co’s cornering the market on cigarette production.

All the while, Daniels became increasingly involved in Democratic Party politics—not just in Raleigh but across the state and around the country. His first political hero was William Jennings Bryan. Daniels was at Bryan’s side during three presidential elections (all of which Bryan lost).

While Josephus Daniels never changed his mind on matters of race, the ardent segregationist was a progressive and a liberal on a broad range of issues from education to women’s rights, said Christensen. “In his time, he fought against the Klu Klux Klan and McCarthyism,” the author said.

Daniels helped Woodrow Wilson’s organize a national presidential campaign in 1912. As a result Daniels, 51, was named Secretary of the Navy during the Wilson Administration, where his chief deputy was FDR, then 31. They made the proverbial odd couple, noted Christensen. 

“The handsome, aristocratic FDR frequented the exclusive clubs clad in English-tailored suits…(while) Daniels, short, dumpy, and allergic to exercise—called the pre-polio FDR, who was six feet two, athletic, and well spoken, “as handsome a figure of an attractive young man as I have ever seen,” wrote Christensen, adding that Daniels probably saved Roosevelt’s political career by covering up an affair he had while serving in the office of the Navy.

When Daniels was named ambassador to Mexico after FDR was elected president in 1932, Jonathan Daniels, his son, took over as the paper’s editor. “He had different ideas on race than his father did,” said Christensen. “(Jonathan) gave more voice for racial issues at a time when Blacks had little voice,” he said.

Jonathan Daniels also played a role in Harry Truman’s surprising 1948 presidential election. Considered the underdog as Truman was getting his from both the left (Henry Wallace) and the right (Strom Thurmond) in his own party and up against a polished GOP candidate, Thomas Dewey, Truman pulled off the upset. Jonathan Daniels was one of his speechwriters. 

The News & Observer, meanwhile, continued to develop as a watchdog publication—not just in Raleigh but across North Carolina. During the 1990s, the paper hired its first Black executives and invited the first African American to join its board of directors. 

Christensen also documents the decline of the newspaper industry, something he bore witness to as a longtime News & Observer staffer who retired in 2018.

As the paper’s former book editor J. Peder Zane noted about Southern News, Southern Politics: ”Ambition and politics, family dynamics, and the grand sweep of history collide and align in Rob Christensen’s epic tale of the North Carolina Newspaper dynasty.”

When Christy Mathewson burst upon the scene with the New York Giants in 1900, baseball had a less-than-perfect image. It was a rowdy game played by roughnecks known for their consumption of alcohol and chewing tobacco, said Alan Gaff, author of Baseball’s First Superstar.

Mathewson’s good looks and his quiet, easy-going manner made him a hit with the ladies, Gaff said. “Women came to baseball games,” he noted, adding that “opposing clubs would schedule Ladies Days for games in which Christy would pitch and women would come in throngs.”

On the field, Mathewson racked up big numbers. In his first 14 seasons with the Giants, he won at least 20 games every season. In 1905, he led the Giants to a championship, winning three games in the World Series that year without surrendering a run.

Gaff also provides a history of baseball’s growth in the early 20th century. The sport was heavily supported by the big newspapers of the day, especially those in New York. Sports sections carried accounts of big-league games that reached millions. As the game gained popularity, larger ballparks were required to accommodate the growing crowds that attended. In New York, the Giants started games just an hour after the closing of the stock market, encouraging the Wall Street crowd to frequent the ballpark.

Mathewson was smart, said Gaff. He could recall situations with opposing batters years later in vivid detail. John McGraw, his longtime manager on the Giants, said that “Mathewson’s real greatness in the game was the example he set for young fellows and the impression he left on the minds of the public. He gave our profession a dignity that it needed and was slow to acquire.”

Before achieving fame as a baseball player, Mathewson was a member of the Bucknell University football team, where he starred as both fullback and drop kicker. He spent three years at Bucknell before becoming a professional baseball player. The school’s football stadium is named after him.

True crime accounts are all the rage these days. But Tom Chorneau didn’t want to just add another cold case to the national docket.

Instead, the unsolved murder of Myrtle Cook in 1925 is related to political forces flowing through the state of Iowa at the time, with Chorneau, a former reporter, explaining the state’s near-constant battle over temperance.

During the first half-century of statehood, Iowa lurched from wet to dry eight times before Prohibition was ratified in 1919. Cook was president of the local temperance union when she was shot through the heart.

Chorneau speculates that it might have been something she saw that cost the woman her life. In any event, the shooting made the front page of the New York Times. The next day her funeral made national news when a small army from the Klu Klux Klan gathered in town on her behalf.

Cook wasn’t just the head of a temperance union but an informant for the law. “Myrtle spent hours at her parlor window, which had a clear view of the Rock Island Railroad station and the dive café next door,” noted Chorneau, adding that “Myrtle kept good notes on the comings and goings of the bootleggers and their customers, who regularly conducted their business at the depot.”

Cook may have even realized that her life was in jeopardy. In a conversation with a friend shortly before her death, “Myrtle didn’t tell Marie what or whom she had seen but ended the conversation with a chilling remark: ‘I believe this work will be the end of me.’” related Chorneau.

Prohibition wasn’t the only force creating change in Iowa. You also had the women’s suffrage movement, the issue of slavery, and the railroad industry all moving across the state. In 1925, Al Capone took over as gang boss in Chicago, creating a ripple effect across the Midwest, especially when it came to bootlegging operations. Chorneau even raises the possibility that Capone himself may have had a hand in the Cook murder.

How did you learn about the American West? Books came first. Reading material included notorious dime novels that made legends of Buffalo Bill and Jesse James. Newspapers and magazines, meanwhile, focused on the American West in the 19th century as railways turned the frontier into an attraction for tourists who watched herds of buffalo disappearing while Native Americans were being herded onto reservations.

Western history was recorded in so many movies—from silent films like On the War Path (1911) and The Indian Massacre (1912) to John Ford epics like Stagecoach (1939) and My Darling Clementine (1946) along with High Noon (1952), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Blazing Saddles (1974) and hundreds more. Between 1947 and 1950 Westerns made up 30 percent of major Hollywood releases.

Maybe you got your first taste from television on shows like Bonanza, Maverick, Cheyenne, or Gunsmoke? On radio, you might have followed the exploits of the Lone Ranger or the Six Shooter with Jimmy Stewart.

William Grady’s Rebranding the Western (University of Texas Press) surveys another medium that explored Western history: the comic. From the start of the 20th century, newspaper comic strips exploded in popularity. 

Western strips like Red Ryder and Lone Ranger blossomed in the 1930s along with Little Joe, a strip that ran from 1933 to 1972, following Joe Oak, a child who lives with his widowed mother on the family ranch managed by a former gunslinger.  

Grady notes that Westerns were part of the comic book craze that evolved in the 1940s and 1950s. That was a period when comic books were sold everywhere: in grocery stores, on newsstands, and at the corner drugstore. “Calculations on the monthly sale of comic books averaged anywhere from 60 million to 100 million across the postwar decade (1945-1954),” he said.

More than 3,400 different Western comic book titles had been printed by 1959, said Grady. “Every comic book publisher, from Ace Magazines to Ziff-Davis Publications, offered a slew of Western titles that featured thrilling adventure tales about cowboys, gunfighters, outlaws, and historical frontier figures,” he said.

Along with Kit Carson, Indian Scout, and Two-Gun Kid, you had Western romance titles like Western Love Trails and Cowgirl Romances. But the comic-book trail wasn’t limited to 19th-century frontier days. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, for example, worked on the Cold War frontier of the 50s, searching out missing atomic scientists or combatting Russian saboteurs, noted Grady.

Western comics reflected the times, said the author. Lobo, an African American hero, arrived in the 1960s while Jonah Hex, a disfigured antihero burst onto the scene in the 1970s. Also in the 70s, Marvel Comics launched Red Wolf, a series where Johnny Wakely, a Cheyenne Indian sought justice for all people on the frontier.

The Western continues to evolve, Grady stated, citing The Walking Dead ( a TV show based on a graphic novel) and Yellowstone (a neo-Western) as contemporary examples of Western-type storytelling. “On one hand, the image of the Western has remained unchanged for over a century. On the other, the genre has regularly experienced transformations that permit it to maintain its compelling hold on audiences,” he said.

Chrysler released a special edition of the Dodge Royal Lancer that Chrysler in 1955 called LaFemme. Marketed as “a car for the modern woman,” the model offered a pink-and-white color scheme along with matching accessories. There was only one problem: women didn’t buy it. Chrysler soon dropped the concept due to low sales.

That’s just one of the examples that Jessica Brockmole details in her book, Pink Cars and Pocketbooks, a study of U.S. auto industry efforts to win over female customers through the 20th century.

Brockmole points out that women were a factor in the acceptance of the automobile in America—almost from the start of the 20th century. Pictured in the book is a 1903 advertisement for Oldsmobile with a headline, “Good Bye, Horse.” A lady driver is shown waving goodbye to a faithful steed standing behind a fence. “Any lady who understands a sewing machine can drive this graceful Runabout,” notes the ad copy.

While automotive history traditionally followed a male orientation with an emphasis on speed and power, women were on the scene, noted Brockmole. “The percentage of driver’s licenses issued to women tripled between 1922 and 1931. Among the consumer homes surveyed, women were driving in over half and, in many of those households, more than one woman drove the family car,” she stated.

In a 1935 study, women made up one-third of U.S. drivers on the road but their “sphere of influence” impacted two-thirds of all car sales, said Brockmole.

Women, used to the vagaries of the fashion industry, weren’t taken aback when Alfred Sloan of General Motors transformed the automotive industry with the concept of planned obsolescence, the launching of “new” car models annually, she said. The idea of making minor design adjustments while offering color and ornamental changes brought car companies into the realm of fashion, the author noted.

Style became substance as industrial designers like Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes were hired by automakers. Brockmole said Dorothy Dignam, an ad executive with the Philadelphia ad agency, N.W. Ayer & Son, helped Ford Motor Co. understand that lines were everything in the 1930s. Dignam outlined ways Ford could promote new models to women concerned with line, style, and appearance, said Brockmole.

In the 1950s, Charlotte Montgomery wrote a column in Good Housekeeping called “Woman and Her Car,” expressing the viewpoint that women were interested in automotive fundamentals, not just a car to match a spring outfit, the author noted.

Brockmole cited Ms. Magazine as an example of promoting a new spirit for women in the 1970s. A woman’s place was no longer solely in the home as working women grew in number and stature, she said. Other periodicals followed providing specific information to women about cars.

A study of the relationship between women and the auto industry is a story with a happy ending, noted Brockmole, adding: “Despite women’s messy history with the automobile, they have claimed the knowledge, the voice, and the confidence to define that relationship for themselves.”

Much is made of the temples and striking artwork of the ancient Maya. Justifiably. Ever since U.S. travel writer John Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood explored the ruins of Copan in Honduras, publishing Incidents of Travel in Central America in 1841, the world has been aware of the “lost world” of the Maya.

Stephens’ dramatic accounts and keen insight at what he found along with Catherwood’s meticulous engravings at numerous Maya sites proved to be a revelation. The public learned about structures like the Temple of the Sun and the Monument at Quirigia, of pyramids and plazas, of carvings and hieroglyphics, of the grandeur of a culture that didn't just exist in a harsh environment for more than 4,000 years but flourished.

Much has been learned since Stephens and Catherwood wielded machetes to cut their way through the area of the world now known as Mesoamerica. We now know the Maya were not only builders, farmers, artists, and warriors--but masters when it came to a sustainable lifestyle. 

Lisa Lucero, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, has investigated Mayan life in Belize for over 35 years. Her book, Maya Wisdom and the Survival of Our Planet, suggests Mayan accomplishments weren’t limited to architecture and art.

“Maya reservoirs at the hundreds of cities supplied millions of people for over 1,000 years,” she said, referring to a period that encompasses the Classic Maya period (250 to 900 A.D.) How did they keep water clean enough for drinking? Lucero talks about the aquatic plants the Maya cultivated to maintain water quality in the same manner as constructed wetlands cleanse soils. “I love talking about water lilies,” she said, referring to sensitive plants that can only grow in clean water. 

Maya kings (one ancient pot pictured in the book shows a king with a water lily headdress) had to be water managers before anything else. In times of drought, maintaining an adequate water supply for a growing population became increasingly difficult, said Lucero. Sustained droughts finally proved calamitous, forcing families to pack up and move, she said.

While many Mayan cities were already abandoned a thousand years before Stephens and Catherwood arrived, Lucero doesn’t view the exodus as a huge mystery. “People focus on the collapse of the Mayan kings (by 900 A.D.). They did disappear. But the people just moved on. They voted with their feet,” she said.

The very fact that the Maya were able to maintain cities in a jungle environment for so long without the technology we now hold in such high esteem is testimony to their understanding of environment and an ability to use the plants, animals, and earth to create what we call a sustainable existence today.

The fact is the Maya didn’t disappear, she said. “More than 7 million Maya live today—some in Illinois,” said Lucero. “The Maya have adapted to many changes over the millennia—demands from Maya kings, Spanish and English colonial rule, and massive droughts. They continue to adapt today in Central America and elsewhere, and many of their ancestral practices are alive and well,” she said.

The problem of climate change requires learning from the Maya, said Lucero. “We are all connected. We are part of one huge family and we need to take care of one another,” she said.   

Before Alison Kosik wrote What's Up With Women and Money?: How To Do All the Financial Stuff You’ve Been Avoiding she’d been a business correspondent for CNN, often filing stories from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Kosik interviewed heads of business and corporate experts regularly but relegated financial decisions to her husband. Although dealing with business on a daily basis on the job, when it came to her own personal finances, she decided not to get involved.

Although in what she called “a bad marriage,” she confessed to being terrified to leave for fear of running aground financially. All of which led to her learning about things like buying a car, a house, and saving for retirement, issues she put off getting involved in for years.

What’s Up gives a step-by-step action plan on various money topics as well as providing interviews with women who share their tales of why not learning about money decisions can lead to problems.
 
Kosik saw the irony in her position. “How could I, of all people, CNN’s business correspondent on Wall Street, be in this position – feeling trapped in a failing marriage because I didn’t have the self-assurance to make important financial decisions that would also impact my young children,” she said.

"I was afraid of making mistakes whether it was our investments, the car buying, or insurance. I didn’t think I had the knowledge and good judgment that comes from experience of 'doing the financial stuff.' I was embarrassed and ashamed,” said Kosik.

Kosik also realized other women were in the same position. 

"Compared to previous generations, women are more educated, they’re carving out careers and running companies. But what I learned through dozens of interviews and research is that even many of these high-achieving women aren’t fully involved with managing their financial lives. They’re pawning it off to their spouses or just plain avoiding it. And they’re not readily admitting it because they don’t want to seem unintelligent by their peers,” said Kosik.

"I hope you discover, as I did, that these financial things aren’t as complicated as you first thought. In fact, once I began tackling these transactions, each little victory made me gain a little more confidence. And over time, I wondered what I had been afraid of in the first place. And why I didn’t start sooner,” she said.

Abbi Waxman, a British-born Californian, is the author of eight books including I Was Told It Would Get Easier, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, and The Garden of Small Beginnings. 

Her latest, One Death at a Time, is promoted as a “feel-good mystery,” a categorization that Waxman seems relatively happy with. But then Waxman confesses to be a relatively happy person. “One Death at a Time is funny. All my books are lighthearted,” she said.

Born in England in 1970, Waxman came to the United States at 21, setting up a lifelong battle between her Britishness and her Americaness, she said. A career in advertising, where she worked as a copywriter and then creative director at various advertising agencies in London and New York, proved to be a great training ground for book writing, she said.

“(Advertising) work is technical but at the same time creative. You have to express an idea in limited space and create an emotional connection.” All that rewriting and editing that goes into ad work helps one prepare a novel, said Waxman.

Growing up in England with an American mother (from Detroit) who was a murder-mystery writer, Waxman’s childhood reading list included books by classic mystery writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. “Rex Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe, is my favorite,” she said.

But along with reading plenty of non-fiction these days, Waxman said she will suddenly read a string of books by various authors from Jane Austen to Stephen King. “King’s a master of description,” she noted.

Absorbing the work of accomplished writers helps restore her faith in the wonder of reading, she said. “It helps me create a world that will transport a reader,” said Waxman.